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'Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed.'

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exeTUAL:
“Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
George Orwell


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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/09/georgeorwell

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This article is more than 20 years old
George Orwell and the eternal truths of good journalism
This article is more than 20 years old
Robert McCrum
Sun 9 Nov 2003 13.14 CET

George Orwell wrote for The Observer for seven years. He and its proprietor-editor, David Astor, were friends. Astor, who had a kind of genius as a journalistic talent-spotter and an extraordinary ability to get the best out of his contributors that marks the great editor, turned to Orwell as part-mentor, part-gadfly during the redefinition of the newspaper in the 1940s.

This extraordinary moment in The Observer 's fortunes, which coincided with a turning point in British history, has just been honoured by the publication of Orwell: The Observer Years (Atlantic Books, £12, pp242), a collection of the 100 articles Orwell wrote for The Observer during the last decade of his short life. Cyril Connolly, who first commissioned Orwell for The Observer, once remarked of his old Etonian schoolfriend that 'he could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry'.

Astor, less sardonic, simply responded to Orwell's 'absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency' and gave him a platform for his mature literary journalism to which we can now look back in awe.

From November 1943 to May 1946, while also completing Animal Farm, Orwell wrote a fortnightly book review for The Observer which, as Jonathan Heawood says in his perceptive introduction to the book, provides 'a fascinating companion to the making of a masterpiece'.

Today, Orwell's reviews remind the reader how little the world of books has changed. They also open a window on to the lost world of the Forties: victorious, yet war-weary, muddled, yet idealistic, monochrome, yet vivid. Here we find him reviewing the essays of Eric Gill, D.W. Brogan's The American Problem, F.R. Leavis's The Great Tradition , writers like Julian Huxley and T.S. Eliot, and biographies of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Charles Dickens and Clement Attlee, the latter by a young politician called Roy Jenkins.

His review of H.G. Wells's During the Crisis of World Revolution, a scrappy and incoherent collage of warmed-up journalism, was so hostile that Wells reportedly never spoke to him again.

Fifty years on, these ephemeral pieces still display a marvellous acuity and freshness and go some way to explaining why Orwell is such an influential English writer for the generations that followed.

Who knows what Orwell would have said of this collection. He would probably have found something to niggle away at, some hint of vanity to tease. He came of a generation that had a loathing for, and suspicion of, self-display. Even now, after several major biographies, and a mountain of critical exegesis, the man himself remains tantalising, almost out of reach.

Photographs don't help much, either. Where you can imagine sitting down to dinner with Connolly, and where you can visualise his contemporaries Greene, Waugh and Wodehouse, Orwell, a vagabond figure with his convict haircut, ragged moustache and cadaverous, injured frame, seems wraithlike.

It's appropriate, too, that there are no indisputable moving pictures of him. The man who signed himself Eric or George remains elusive. For him, what mattered were the words on the page, filed on time, to length. He would probably say that it is the quality of the best journalists that they should be invisible. That, in 2003, makes him seem peculiar, almost freakish.

It is not just this peculiarity that makes him hard to conjure. In many ways, the old Etonian who chose to go slumming, the destitute novelist who went to the Spanish Civil War, was an old-fashioned romantic in the tradition of de Quincy or Stevenson. Like the latter, he could be astonishingly stoical.

One of the most extraordinary parts of Orwell: The Observer Years is the moment after the tragic, unexpected death of his first wife, Eileen, when, within a week of the funeral, he not only found time to settle his young son, Richard, in a temporary home, but also to dash back to a defeated Germany to file a long, prescient report on the 'future of a ruined Germany'.

Within a year, Orwell had published 'Politics and the English Language' (in Horizon ) in which he lamented the state of contemporary journalism and advised would-be writers: 'A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.'

Astor had a copy of this celebrated essay given to every new Observer recruit. Even now, it is quoted in our style book. As Jonathan Heawood notes: 'The bit about drinking has never had much impact, but Orwell's criticism of slovenly language is still taken very seriously.'

· The exhibition Orwell Observed is free and runs until 9 January at the Newsroom, Guardian and Observer archive and visitor centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1.

See
or call 0207 886 9898.

robert.mccrum @observer.co.uk
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